Chatbots are still an emerging technology, but they have shown that as the more tech-savvy generations grow, so does the usage and opportunities for chatbots.

For businesses, chatbots can help bridge the communication gap between a business and their audience. Chatbots have already penetrated industries such as retail, customer service, airlines, banking and finance, news and media, and healthcare.

There is an abundant amount of options businesses can utilize to build a chatbot specific to its company. The integrations of artificial intelligence within chatbots give more dynamic and robust self-serving channels for better customer engagement. The developments in AI will eventually push chatbots to become the solution for standardized communication channels and the single voice to solve consumer's needs.

Chatbot Framework & Open Source Projects

There are a number of approaches to building a chatbot. Open source projects are programs developed collaboratively by a group of coders and made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit for free. Open source software is intended to be freely shared and possibly improved upon and redistributed to anyone else without restriction.

A chatbot framework is a set of predefined functions and classes that are used by developers and coders to build bots from scratch using programming languages such as Python, PHP, Java, or Ruby. The frameworks are where chatbots behavior is defined with a set of tools that help developers write code more quickly and efficiently. Facebook Bot Engine, which owns Wit.ai, can extract certain predefined entities such as time and dates. It extracts user's intent and then processes and defines the data given.

Chatbot platforms (a term often used interchangeably yet incorrectly with frameworks) are online ecosystems where chatbots can be deployed and interact with users or other platforms. Typically, platforms are used by non-technical users to develop bots without coding.

Chatfuel and Facebook Messenger Platform are a couple of platforms that were developed to make building a bot easier for users by linking to external sources through plugins. It provides a base to deploy and run the chatbot, whereas a chatbot framework helps develop and bind together various components to the application.

For businesses, platforms eliminate the need to hire developers to build a chatbot and allows users to quickly create robust chatbots without any coding. Platforms usually include a toolkit to create a chatbot, deploy it on any available messaging platform, and connect it to APIs. Google's Cloud Natural Language API, Microsoft's Cognitive Services APIs, and IBM Watson Conversation provide commercial NLU (Natural Learning Understanding) services that could be used to optimize chatbot efficiencies in self-service.

Chatbot Maker Software

Facebook Chatbots can be built through hard coding by developers, but machine learning typically requires a large amount of streaming data so that the system learns on its own.

However, building chatbots is not exclusive to developers. There are a number of platforms accessible for businesses to start building one without writing a line of code. Nowadays, a business would only need to design the conversation flow and structure within a chatbot platform.

Chatfuel started in 2015 with the intention to make it easy to build chatbots for Facebook Messenger. It allows users to provide features such as content cards that are automatically shared with their customers, collect information within Messenger chats with forms and quick response buttons, and use AI to recognize customers' answers and respond appropriately. Companies such as Adidas, MTV, British Airways, and Volkswagen use Chatfuel to power their chatbot.

Botpress provides developers with an abundant number of open-source chatbot projects that saves them time. They provide a collection of specialized, open-source modules and offer most projects for free to create transparency. The focus is on the ultimate enterprise bot development that aims to satisfy serious bot developers. It offers countless software development tools for creating and managing code, as well as visual tools that are essential for efficient coding.

Facebook Messenger Platform allows users to build a chatbot via Facebook's official page, but it requires more functionality that the user will have to set up themselves. Facebook provides a guide for users to setup the Messenger plugin, Messenger codes and links, customer matching, structured templates, and a Welcome Screen. CNN and Poncho are popular chatbots that use Facebook Messenger as their chatbot platform.

Chatbots for Businesses a Growing Market

BI Intelligence Chatbots have a number of advantages over mobile apps. They are considerably simpler and faster to develop, release, and maintain than mobile applications. The increase in investments by big companies such as IBM, Facebook, and Google have released a number of free advanced development tools and frameworks and large amounts of research. Now, development of a high functioning chatbot that utilizes AI, NLP, speech recognition and other technologies can be done at a relatively low cost.

The increased demand for chatbots stems from the increasing usage of chat messenger applications. Mobile messengers such as Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and others have become the preferred means of communication between mobile devices. Facebook Messenger alone has more than 20 million active business users. It's expected that chatbots will continue to serve and solve common issues and repetitive tasks within various industries.

More to Learn

Chatbots for business will continue to improve in the coming years. Chatbot architecture and design will evolve to the point that interactive AI will become standard for customer service. But there are numerous applications for chatbots across a variety of sectors.

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